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Using GPU Video Acceleration Under Linux

Phoronix: Using GPU Video Acceleration Under Linux

For those intrigued by the article written by XBMC developers after being frustrated by AMD's Catalyst Linux driver, here's a look at some of the other options for GPU-based video acceleration under Linux...

Would've been nice if you also went further than just decoding. For example, VAAPI currently has only basic bob deinterlacing. And there's no deinterlacing of mpeg2 video on Ironlake, because of colorspace issues: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archive...ry/014847.html

On the other hand, VDPAU has motion-adaptive spacial-temporal deinterlacing (yay buzzwords ), both single-rate and double-rate. The double-rate one is excellent for watching live sports, like the currently ongoing Euro2012 . Then there's IVTC (inverse telecine).

No idea about deinterlacing on XvBA.

Further, both VDPAU and VAAPI provide high-quality scaling. VDPAU also has sharpening and denoising, though I haven't tested those two yet.

I forgot to mention, good work on this article, Michael, it was very informative! I never really realised what each of the vendors' solutions used for the video acceleration, and this makes things quite clear!

I run XBMC on an AMD E-350 APU. The CPU is not nearly powerful enough to decode HD video in real-time, so XvBA is the only real option. First, I tried mainline XBMC with the XvBA/VA-API bridge. Crash city. Fortunately, I found a branch of XBMC that uses XvBA directly. This one doesn't crash, but pausing and then resuming playback results in a few seconds of A/V desync. AMD really needs to stop screwing around and just implement VA-API or VDPAU directly (and not botch it).

The thing that really pisses me off, though, is that supporting proper video decoding in the open-source drivers will require reverse-engineering because AMD can't release the specifications because of WINDOWS DRM. Fuck you, Microsoft, and fuck you, AMD, for capitulating.

So much APIs for the same task. Why not merging them? Fuck all this mess done by cops, they want to annoy the others and they annoy the users and developers even more. Why not just use OpenMAX instead?

Seriously, most of the Linux problems are due that most important projects lack of proper leadership and strong management. Xorg/MESA should have a stronger presence in Khronos Group, for example

Seriously, Xorg/MESA should be a lot stronger organization with a stricter leadership.

Michael: What about an article doing a nice comparison between all those video acceleration APIs? You have some interesting bits in the comments of this article